Hawk or heavenly lark or heard-of nightingale, Perform upon the kite-strings of our sight In a false distance, that the day and night Are full of winged words gone rather stale, That nothing is so worn As Philomers bosom-thorn, That it is, in fact, the male Nightingale which sings, and that all these creatures wear Invisible armor such as Hubert beheld His water-ousel through, as, wrapped or shelled In a clear bellying veil or bubble of air, It bucked the flood to feed At the stream-bottom. Agreed That the sky is a vast claire In which the gull, despite appearances, is not Less claustral than the oyster in its beak And dives like nothing human; that we seek Vainly to know the heron (but can plot What angle of the light Provokes its northern flight) . Let them be polyglot And wordless then, those boughs that spoke with Solomon In Hebrew canticles, and made him wise; And let a clear and bitter wind arise To storm into the hotbeds of the sun, And there, beyond a doubt, Batter the Phoenix out. Let us, with glass or gun, Watch (from our clever blinds) the monsters of the sky Dwindle to habit, habitat, and song, And tell the imagination it is wrong Till, lest it be undone, it spin a lie So fresh, so pure, so rare As to possess the air. Why should it be more shy Than chimney-nesting storks, or sparrows on a wall? Oh, let it climb wherever it can cling Like some great trumpet-vine, a natural thing To which all birds that fly come natural* Come, stranger, sister, dove: Put on the reins of love. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...CREDO by WILLIAM ARTHUR DUNKERLEY IN HARDWOOD GROVES by ROBERT FROST THE GHOSTS OF THE BUFFALOES by NICHOLAS VACHEL LINDSAY THE RUBAIYAT, 1879 EDITION: 23 by OMAR KHAYYAM PERFECT WOMAN by WILLIAM WORDSWORTH FRED ENGLEHARDT'S BABY by CHARLES FOLLEN ADAMS |